A bomb assassination today in downtown St. Petersburg, Russia killed former Donbass fighter turned journalist Maksim Fomin. Fomin was speaking at an event in his honor at the Street Food Bar #1 Cafe, sponsored by those who valued his reporting. Of the 25 injured, 19 have been hospitalized.
Fomin had joined the local Donbass militias in 2014, in opposition to the coup in Kiev. He served for five years, then he began reporting from the front, with the pen name of Vladlen Tatarsky. In January 2023, Kiev placed some sort of sanctions on him. Meantime, the Myrotvorets kill list, originally launched in 2014 in Donbass, targeting those who reported on the assaults by Kiev’s paramilitaries—Azov, Aidar, etc.—in the Donbass.
Russia’s REN TV channel cited a witness that a statuette that Fomin was holding exploded while he was speaking. One video that surfaced on social media shows a man giving Fomin what seems to be a large bust. Several Russian media outlets report that a young woman presented a figurine to him during the event, but her identity is unknown so far.
